Domain expiration can be a frustrating experience. The advent of the “redemption period” has caused a lot of sticker shock to unwary domain owners when they seek to renew an expired domain. Understanding the process of domain expiration is a crucial first step in avoiding having to pay additional fees. Understand the steps in the process described will always be the same, but the amount of time each step takes is, with one exception, determined by the individual registrar. Only your registrar can provide the specific amount of time they will start sending renewal notices or keep a domain in hold status, so it is important to know your individual registrar’s policies.

Step 1: Active Status

Domains within their registration dates are generally on “active” status. Some domains may be in a “lock” status as well, either by the registry or the registrar. This means the details of the domain cannot be changed without the lock status being removed. This is generally a security measure to prevent a domain from being tampered with or transferred to another registrar without the owner’s approval. Active status means a domain is live and visible, depending on the status of the server hosting the site. At any point in its active life, a domain can be renewed for an additional term of one or more years for whatever the individual registrar’s going annual rate.

At some point near the end of the current registration period renewal notices will be sent. The exact time is determined by the individual registrar and could be anytime from one to six months in advance of the expiration. The notices will be sent to the contact email on the domain. This is probably the number one cause of unwanted domain expiration, inaccurate contact information. Always make sure the contact information on the domain is up to date. Be aware that making changes to contact information with a hosting company will, in virtually all cases, not update the information on the domain. The contact information on a domain must be kept current via the domain’s registrar.

Step 2: On-Hold

The “registrar-hold” status occurs when the domain expires or shortly after, depending on the discretion of the actual registrar. Domains in the “hold” status will cease functioning and the site they reference will appear to be “down”, even though the webserver hosting them is likely up. Some registrars will provide a short grace period of active functioning after the domain expires and before placing it on hold. When a domain is on hold status, it can be renewed for the standard fee charged by the individual registrar. This is the last point at which renewal at the registrar’s normal rates is possible.

Step 3: Redemption Period

This is a more recent development, one created by ICANN, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers, ostensively to allow domain owners a “second chance” at renewing their domains and preventing their loss to other parties. Though useful, this “service” doesn’t come free. Like most elements of this timeline, the fee will vary from registrar to registrar, though it will generally be in excess of seventy dollars. Prices can rise up to $150 dollars or more at some registrars. The one difference here is the time period, which is always 30 days. The actual start date can be determined by the registrar, but once initiated, it will be 30 days, unless the customer chooses to pay the fee and redeem the domain.

Step: 4: Pending Delete

The final step prior to complete release of the domain for anyone to register at any registrar. Pending delete status follows the 30 day redemption period and lasts up to 5 days. There is no way to renew the domain once this status is reached, including paying the redemption fee. The only option is to wait for the domain to be purged and then re-register. There are various services from a variety of registrars that claim to offer “backorder” registration services for expiring domains, essentially attempting to pick them up as soon as they are released from the registry. Though none of them provide 100% guarantees of success, it may be worth considering if the domain is in danger of being picked up by other parties.

Conclusions

Always keep domain contact information up-to-date. This point cannot be overemphasized. Keeping that one rule in mind will help avoid having to deal with redemption fees for an important domain. Multi-year registrations are a double-edged sword, useful to lock down a domain for up to a decade, but also making it more likely contact information will change over that long period and requiring further vigilance on the part of the owner. The domain expiration process is not straightforward and can result in a hefty fee. If the domain is important, then it is important to keep track of it and make sure the registrar can provide notification of impending expirations.

Author: Tamara Field (EzineArticles.com)

For one thing, you should know that domain registration is available much to the people and the business via a registrar that is available online. Of course, you are going to need to pay some sort of fee and charge for these services, and they will range quite a lot from one company to another. This means that when you are going to attach yourself to a company, you might need to know about how you are going to compare price versus quality of service. For the most part, the charges from one company to another would almost be the same, judging by the fact that most of these companies are going to want to keep things competitive.

Of course, some are going to be more expensive, and this is deemed by the size of the company and the sort of services and securities that they are going to give you. When you do register, you are going to have to give up some information to the company of course, and of course, there are times when you do not want to do this. You have options at this point, options where you are going to be able to do this through a proxy, where your information is sent through a secure channel and is kept private at most times.

Also significant, be certain you will possess the domain forename, as some registrars preserve manage over the domains they catalog. And be sure you keep hold of the alternative to transport the domain to an additional registrar, if you desire. There may be a preliminary epoch after which this becomes probable. Look for any cost that may be acquire as a consequence of transporting the sphere. This could become significant downwards the highway if you aspiration to take benefit of an additional register’s products or services.

These are some of the things that you are going to want to know about the whole concept of domain registration. Of course, if you need to know about domain registration and the technical aspects like server language, domain operating systems and of course, the many ways you can go about doing things. You can Google the topic and you will find many websites offering a host of information about this. Domain registration is something that is finding its way as a common aspect of web hosting.

Author: James Koh
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

In order to have an add on domain, you will first have to register another domain name or direct the existing domain that you have already registered with the servers. You will then need to use the add on domain feature in your web hosting control panel to secure your web site and its features. This will cover your domain registration.

The control panel prompts you to create a user name and password when you add an add on domain. The user name will then be used to put up a directory within your own public html directory which will store all files relative to that domain. The password will give the independent ftp access to the said domain’s directory and files.

Now the nice part about this is that add on domains have the luxury of its very own URL, addondomain.com, and everyone wishing to visit the site can just put it the URL at their browsers and enjoy it like any other web site. An add on domain uses the space and bandwidth that is typical to your main-domain in web hosting. Add on domains also have its own CGI and FTP access, its own email accounts and web statistics, which include the preferred AWStats package by clients, and sub-domains may even be created under these add on domains.

It is worthy to note however, that every add on domain does not have its own configured control panel. The viewing of statistics and the placing of add on domain configuration must be done at the control panel of your main-domain. The add on domains also count as sub-domains, meaning that every time you add an add on domain in your web hosting process, you are deducted one sub-domain that is available to you.

Optimizing Your Web Hosting Space With Add On Domains

You wonder if it is possible to have two or more web sites with two or more domains using a single domain account. You ask if you can do all this without paying for another separate hosting account. Yes, this is possible by using add on domains.

Add on domains are new domains added and included over and above your main domain. It develops a sub-directory within your main web hosting directory but can interface a different or another web site. After your domain registration, the add on domain gathers the information from the sub-domain directory using the same space and bandwidth as your main account but cannot have its own separate control panel.

Benefits of Having an Add On Domain

1) You can create several domains and web sites using the same web hosting account.
2) You can save money using a single hosting account instead of several accounts.
3) The add on domain shares the same resources with your main site, like disk space, bandwidth, etc.
4) The add on domain has its own independent FTP manager, site statistics and storage bins which are automatically posted.
5) You can upload different postings, pages, images and forums to your add on domain directory.
6) You can access your add on domain using various web site addresses.
7) Several sites can be promoted with just a single hosting account using different sets of keywords.

Creating An Add On Domain

1) Register your new add on domain with a domain name registrar.
2) Direct the domain name server (DNS) information of your new add on domain to the same DNS of your web host.
3) Give an allowance of 1 to 2 days for the DNS to flourish over the Internet before uploading files or documents.
4) Log in to your control panel or web hosting manager and move to the add on domains.
5) You need to fill in three fields, namely: the new domain name, the user name, and a password.
6) Click the ‘Add Domain’ button, and wait for a couple of minutes for the system to set-up an add on domain name.
7) When completed, you can already start uploading your index pages, images, and other relative information.

Pace Work Technologies is a web hosting company and a domain register offering free domain name, website builder, dedicated server, virtual private server, semi-dedicated server, website builder, php scripts, 30 days money back guarantee and 24/7 customer and technical support.

Author: Marcus Lim
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

On Wednesday, the deal expired. Under a new agreement, the U.S. Department of Commerce will still participate in Internet reviews, but ICANN will now take over the majority of Internet governance decisions with the participation of stakeholders from 100 countries.

“The Affirmation of Commitments by ICANN and DOC fulfills a long-standing objective of the original formation of ICANN: to create an organization that can serve the world’s interest in a robust, reliable and interoperable Internet,” said Cerf, in a statement.

Read full story: ChannelWeb

Google’s Matt Cutts responds to this question.

But this is not true, as the domain age has nothing to do with the ranking they achieve is less time or more time. It depends upon the link profile and the manner in which it is developed. However old sites have more link profile than newly launched one, for instance site that is 2 years old has larger link profile than those who became online recently.

Google has three primary aspects which they take into account when they scan the links that point to your website. The search engine also sees the number of links that points back to your web pages, hence number does counts. Apart from quantity search engines also see quality of these back links. Even the domain authority that points to your site is seen, the page links that are working and relevancy of your web content is also scanned by search engine bots.

Diversity of the link profile is also seen, things like whether you are getting links from many domains or just few ones is observed. The time period of links that are actively pointing towards your website is seen by the Google. The longer the duration, stronger it would get. Such factors are totally against spamming, therefore those interested in building high quality links through spamming will not benefit as much they desire.

You can constitute that link profile, its quantity, quality and maturity is what that matters for domain name success. If all the above aspects are done in correct manner than you are surely going to get higher ranking. Sometimes company name is used in URL, which is very good idea. It makes for the visitors to find your website easily on world wide web thus increasing chances for huge visitor base.

As far as SEO is concerned, it has to be done in certain way that carries out regular maintenance of the site visibility and web traffic.

by Alan Smith

DNS makes the IP numbers more human-readable by translating them into words, and vice versa (like a telephone book). DNS servers accomplish this task by having an alternative set of “records”. Following is a list of the records you’ll find most useful. There are other types of records such as TXT records, but they’re not necessary for the majority of applications.

The IP address(es) that the website can be located on is on the “A” (Host) record. An example of an IP address is 123.45.678.9. Every network is identified by a specific IP address.

The inverse of A records, PTR (Pointer) records are employed by Reverse Map zone files to match a host name with an IP address.

A mail exchanger or MX record is a sort of resource record in the Domain Name System which specifies how Internet e-mail needs to be routed. MX records have two parts: a preference, and a host name. An MX record may have a form such as mydomain.tld 14000 (10) mydomain.tld. It’s possible to have multiple MX records for one host.

A CNAME – Shorthand for canonical name, also called a CNAME record, a record within a DNS zone which specifies the true, or canonical host name of a computer with which its aliases are associated. An IP address is necessary for a computer hosting Web site to connect to the World Wide Web. While the IP address is generated by the DNS from its domain name, oftentimes an IP address will be produced by multiple domain names, in which case the CNAME will need to be employed. There’s no limit on the number of CNAME aliases a machine can have, but the database must contain a separate CNAME record for each one of them. A CNAME record is most commonly used to accept “www.”, when the domain is typed in by someone.

NS (Nameserver) Records – NS records list the allowable name servers in the domain. An elementary DNS zone is shown, below:

* sampledomain.org. 86400 IN NS ns1.samplehostname.com.

* sampledomain.org. 86400 IN NS ns2.samplehostname.com. (Domains are required to have at least two NS records)

* customers 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199 (This is a subdomain “A” record – it would look like customers.sampledomain.org when typed into your browser)

* sampledomain.org. 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199

* mail.sampledomain.org. 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199

* webmail.sampledomain.org. 14400 IN A 569.20.67.199

* ftp.sampledomain.org. 14400 IN CNAME sampledomain.org.

* www.sampledomain.org. 14400 CNAME sampledomain.org.

* sampledomain.org. 14400 MX (10) mail.sampledomain.org.

The rest of the entries in DNS zone records:

TTL – 14400 and 86400 – TTL “Time to Live” specifies the time period, in seconds, within which client side programs may cache the record. The records should be cached if it is set at 0. 0 to 2147483647, or 68 years, is the range that will be defined.

Class – IN – The class indicates the record type. Internet is also called IN. Every other option is outdated. You must use “IN” if your DNS is on the Internet or Intranet.

Written by Stephen Grisham, Sr. a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC.

The mere fact that a phrase is trademarked does not automatically mean you are out of luck. For example, if the trademark is for a single real dictionary word, like “dog” or “cat,” you may be able to challenge the trademark on “public domain” grounds. The same applies to commonly used phrases, like “time will tell”. Unique phrases, like “Joe’s Pro Bike Shop” will certainly lead to problems on your end.

Sometimes, even a specific trademarked phrase, or something very similar to it, may be safe as long as there is little chance of confusion with the trademarked business, and a low probability that your domain will siphon internet traffic away from the trademark owner’s web site. An example might be a phrase that is used within a completely different business sector than that of the trademark owner, and there is no duplication of the trademark owner’s unique styling of the phrase in his/her corporate logo. These decisions can be complex, and may require the advice of a competent intellectual property lawyer.

The Clinton era Lanham Act provides some guidance on the general topic of internet domain trademark law. It is not an all-encompassing law, as common law and state regulation also impact the subject. Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)) disallows “false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact in commerce, which is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person.” As you can see, this somewhat clarifies the issue of what can and cannot be considered a safe harbor for domain registration. The mere duplication (or semi-duplication) of a trademarked name does not automatically lead to risk of confiscation. The potential harm to the trademark owner is factored into the analysis.

Another aspect of the Lanham Act is that it protects, to an extent, the right of an individual to how his or her own name is used, even if his/her name is not trademarked. For example, if you create a domain like “daveletterman.com” and use the domain to falsely imply that Dave Letterman is endorsing a product you are selling on the associated web site, you would be in violation of the Lanham Act. You run a lower risk if the associated web site is non-commercial (say, an informational site about the individual), as long as the material you present is factual. Lanham Act aside, you need to be very careful in general when the individual’s name is trademarked (either as the name by itself, or as part of a phrase like “Dave Letterman Enterprises”). These cases have been litigated in the past, typically in favor of the plaintiff.

Domain Extensions

Each domain extension (like .com, .net, etc.) falls under the jurisdiction of the laws and customs of a particular country. The major generic extensions, like .com, .net, .org, and .info may be registered by anyone anywhere.

Many other extensions have what are called “nexus requirements.” These are conditions the applicable jurisdiction and registration authorities impose in determining whether or not you are entitled to own a particular domain name (for reasons apart from trademark infringement). For example, the .us extension is limited to US citizens, US residents, and those operating businesses or organizations in the US.

Nexus requirements vary by extension. Some relate to citizenship, others relate to residency, yet others relate to whether or not you are operating a web site related to the second level domain name, etc. Some extensions involve multiple nexus requirements (e.g., residency and relevance of the second level domain name to site content). Australia (.com.au) has one of the strictest nexus requirements; you have to actually be running physical business operations in Australia that are related to the domain name.

Important country specific extensions that are safe for anyone to own, without any material nexus requirements, include .at (Austria), .be (Belgium), .ch (Switzerland), .co.nz (New Zealand), .co.uk (Great Britain), .de (Germany), .eu (European Community), .ph (Philippines), .ro (Romania), .ru (Russia), and .co.za (South Africa). By “material,” I am referring to the fact that a small number of the above extensions have the requirement that your domain be held by a registered agent with a physical presence in the applicable area (the .eu extension is an example) if you are not a local citizen. Major domain registrars sometimes provide registered agent services at no charge when you register a new domain using their system. The domain registrar simply owns the domain for you beneficially; you retain full rights to use or sell the domain as you wish, just as with any other domain.

In Closing

Domain registration law can be complex, and is an evolving topic, both in terms of formal “black letter” requirements, as well as applicable case law. There will be situations where you are obviously within a safe harbor, and other times where it is equally obvious that you are at material risk of uncompensated confiscation. In gray areas, a well trained intellectual property attorney may be required to help you make the correct call.

By Stewart Engelman – DNI Services

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Let me explain. Yes, ICANN understands how emotionally traumatic and financially disastrous it can be to lose your domain due to registrar error or your own poor bookkeeping. To paraphrase what was once so famously said, “They feel your pain.” And ICANN has made proposals to alleviate this trauma. Evidence of this can be found at the ICANN website under the heading “Life Cycle Of A Typical gTLD (generic Top Level Domain; i.e., Com, Net, Org, etc.). There you will find this clever illustration made up of several arrows demonstrating the life cycle of one of the above mentioned TLDs.

One of the arrows has the title-in large print-Auto-Renew Grace Period. “Great!” you think. But under this title in small print is the kicker (0-45days). In other words that Grace Period is just as long as the entity controlling the domain wants it to be. It can be as long as a month and a half-which strikes me as a bit much-or as short as zip (a bit little). And guess what, Mr. Mrs. and Ms. Registrant, that controlling entity isn’t you.

But don’t worry, you should know in advance what the policy of your Registrar is regarding the length of the Auto-Renew Grace Period under his aegis. After all, the RAA (Registration Accreditation Agreement), the controlling agreement between ICANN and the registrars, says that the Registrar should clearly state on its website its auto-renewal policy. I fear the determinative word here is “should.” I’m no lawyer but I don’t think “should” is a synonym for “will.” In my experience that information is usually on the website somewhere-but not exactly front-and-center. So if you’re not sure, ask. Better yet watch your domains closely and don’t let them expire. Now let me ask you again, “How long is your Auto-Renewal Grace Period?”

Article written by Mike Nardine